The Hundred Years' War 1337–1453

Q&A 6 min read

What Was the Anglo-Scottish War?

The Anglo-Scottish War was the long-running sequence of conflicts between the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland that stretched from the late thirteenth century to the early sixteenth. The war was fought, with long truces, in two main bursts: the Scottish Wars of Independence (1296–1328), which began with Edward I’s invasion and ended with the Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton in 1328; and the long Anglo-Scottish conflict of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which merged with the Hundred Years’ War when French support for Scotland made the northern frontier an extension of the French war. The standard treatment is Ranald Nicholson’s Scotland: The Later Middle Ages (1974) and the contributions to Jenny Wormald’s Court, Kirk, and Community (1981); Jonathan Sumption’s The Hundred Years’ War covers the period as it intersects with the main conflict.

The Scottish Wars of Independence

The Scottish Wars of Independence began in 1296 with the English invasion under Edward I, whose response to the Scottish refusal of feudal homage was the storming of Berwick and the removal of the Scottish coronation regalia. The war was, in form, a French-supported war of independence: the Scots, led by William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, fought a long campaign against the English, and the French provided subsidies and occasional military support. The war produced the famous English victory at Falkirk in 1298, the Scottish victory at Bannockburn on 24 June 1314, the long English occupation of southern Scotland, and the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320, which articulated the Scottish claim of independence.

The Wars of Independence were settled, in the first instance, by the Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton of 1328, by which Edward III, then a boy-king under the regency of Isabella and Mortimer, recognised Scottish independence. The treaty was confirmed by the marriage of Edward’s sister Joan to the Scottish king David II in 1329. The settlement was unstable from the start. Edward Balliol’s challenge for the Scottish throne in the 1330s, supported by Edward III, reopened the war.

The Anglo-Scottish conflict in the Hundred Years’ War

The Anglo-Scottish conflict merged with the Hundred Years’ War in 1336, when Edward III, in pursuit of the French war, also reasserted the English claim to the Scottish throne. The Auld Alliance of 1295, renewed in 1326 and again in 1338, made the Scottish war a permanent feature of the French war: the French supported the Scots with subsidies, with the occasional expeditionary force, and with the diplomatic recognition of the French crown.

The most important Anglo-Scottish engagements of the period were:

  • Halidon Hill, 19 July 1333. Edward III defeated a Scottish army attempting to relieve the besieged town of Berwick. The engagement demonstrated the tactical superiority of the English longbow against the Scottish schiltrom, the close-packed infantry formation that had been decisive at Bannockburn.
  • Neville’s Cross, 17 October 1346. The English, under William Zouche, archbishop of York and lord of the northern marches, defeated a French-supported Scottish army under King David II, who was attempting to relieve the French position in Normandy. David was captured and held prisoner in England for eleven years.
  • Otterburn, 5 August 1388. A Scottish army under James, Earl of Douglas, defeated an English force under Henry Percy, known as Harry Hotspur, in a night engagement near Otterburn in Northumberland. The battle was the subject of the famous English ballad “Chevy Chase.”
  • Humbleton Hill, 14 September 1402. The English, under Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, defeated a large Scottish army that was attempting to relieve the besieged town of Homildon Hill. The English longbow, again, was the decisive weapon.
  • Verneuil, 17 August 1424. A Franco-Scottish army under the Earl of Douglas and the Duke of Alençon attempted to relieve the English siege of Verneuil. The English, under John, Duke of Bedford, defeated the army in a pitched battle in which the Scottish contingent was almost annihilated. The engagement is sometimes called a “second Agincourt.”

The Anglo-Scottish engagements of the period were, in the standard reading, a permanent drain on English military resources. The English had to maintain substantial garrisons on the Scottish border even when fighting a major war in France; the Scottish raids on the northern English counties required the diversion of troops; and the French subsidies to the Scottish crown kept the Scottish war alive for the entire duration of the conflict.

The Auld Alliance and the French war

The French support for Scotland, in the form of the Auld Alliance of 1295, was the diplomatic framework of the Anglo-Scottish conflict. The alliance was renewed by Philip VI in 1326 and again in 1346 and 1385. The French subsidies, while not large in absolute terms, were sufficient to keep the Scottish war alive at the level of a permanent border conflict. The alliance was the diplomatic counterpart of the English claim to the French throne: the French could not defeat the English in France without the Scottish war, and the Scots could not defeat the English without French support.

The most spectacular use of the Auld Alliance in the war was the French-sponsored Scottish invasion of northern England in 1346, which ended in the Scottish defeat at Neville’s Cross on 17 October 1346 and the capture of King David II. The second was the French-sponsored Franco-Scottish expedition of 1424, which ended in the destruction of the Scottish army at Verneuil. Both engagements demonstrated the limits of the Auld Alliance as a strategic instrument. The French could support the Scottish war, but they could not win it.

The end of the Anglo-Scottish War

The Anglo-Scottish conflict dragged on through the Wars of the Roses and into the early sixteenth century, with the English victory at Flodden on 9 September 1513 the last great battle of the long war. The conflict was definitively closed, in political terms, by the Union of the Crowns of 1603, when James VI of Scotland succeeded Elizabeth I as James I of England, uniting the two crowns in a single person. The personal union of 1603 led, eventually, to the Acts of Union of 1707 and the political union of the two kingdoms.

The end of the war was not, in any sense, a victory for either side. The English, exhausted by the Hundred Years’ War and the Wars of the Roses, did not have the resources to subdue Scotland. The Scots, exhausted by the long border conflict, did not have the resources to press the war against England. The political settlement of 1603 was the consequence of a generation of political exhaustion on both sides of the border.

Significance

The Anglo-Scottish War is one of the longest conflicts in European history. The war, in the standard reading of Nicholson, was the structural reason the English could not concentrate their resources on the French war. The English had to fight on two fronts, and the Scottish war was the more expensive of the two in terms of men and money. The French subsidies, while modest, kept the Scottish war alive at a level that the English could not ignore. The war ended, when it did, because both sides were exhausted. The English, by the 1450s, had lost both their continental empire and their capacity to fight a major war. The Scots, by the 1540s, had lost their French ally and their capacity to mount a major independent war. The political settlement of 1603 was the consequence of a century of exhaustion.